It would be wrong to take too much credit, to start throwing around phrases such as guerrilla intervention or self-styled people’s transport tsar, after reports began to appear this week of dramatic government concessions on the multibillion-pound redevelopment of Euston station.
Other people might want to use words like disrupter, influencer, even hero. Obviously I can’t stop them. I might even encourage them to do so if it helps to add labels, to repeat words that are already out there, phrases such as rainmaker, opinioniser, thoughtfluencer, twat and who is this annoying bloke.
But an odd thing did happen this week. A tweet I posted on the way to Manchester City against Arsenal two weeks ago developed an unexpected second life. Annoyed by the usual levels of disdain and carelessness towards football supporters waiting to catch a train, I’d described Euston as the worst station in Europe and mentioned the feeling it inspires of being taken away to be machine-gunned in a forest clearing in front of vast lighted advert boards.
Euston is easily, easily the worst main station in Western Europe. It’s like being taken away to be machine gunned in the woods by various mobile phone and soft drinks companies. Congrats to everyone involved pic.twitter.com/uclZj46awK
— Barney Ronay (@barneyronay) September 22, 2024
At the time of writing this tweet has now appeared as a key example of public infrastructure anger in four UK newspapers, the Observer, Guardian, Evening Standard and Telegraph. Not really sure what the other nationals are waiting for to be honest. But whatever, the Times.
As of Friday even the giant screens of death have gone dark for a bit. Again, we don’t write our own destinies. They write us. And right now this thing feels like it’s out there running under its own steam. My tweet about Euston has agency. It has become a player.
By Tuesday it had stopped returning my calls and hired its own representation. By Thursday there was industry talk of movie options, franchise opportunities, perhaps a six-part TV series starring a worried-looking Robert Carlyle. A warning, though. This cycle is short. I fully expect to wake up on Saturday and discover my Euston tweet is dating Wayne Bridge and agreeing with people on the internet about chem trails.
In reality, of course, the only reaction is a feeling of shock at finally, after two decades, saying something that actually resonates with some part of the general public. Even if it involves making the world’s most self-evident observation. Everyone knows what’s wrong with Euston. There are pressure groups who work at this stuff all the time, campaigners who have repeatedly explained why this matters to the rest of the country at least as much as it does to the capital.
But it is still a thing, and one that is worth coming back to, if only because it speaks to how we get to follow sport. There are three Premier League games on Saturday requiring fans to pass through the Euston meat-grinder, which will of course show no concession to timings or capacity, which will basically tell any supporter from London or the north-west required to use this monopoly service that they are just a grudgingly tolerated entry on the profit and loss sheet.
This was once a lovely-looking gateway to the north. It was torn down and made horrible by planners in the 1970s. More recently Euston has been jiggered around by confusion over HS2, and made much worse by insane short-term changes, most notably the decision to herd people outside to wait in an angsty throng, all the better to create the three-minute stampede between sadistically late platform announcements and your double-booked and insultingly shabby seat.
At the end of which Euston is not just the worst rail terminus, but arguably the worst thing. The vibe is outright hostility, an absolute hatred of space, comfort, beauty, people. There is a theory all big London stations speak to how the government really sees its various regions. St Pancras has to be nice: it’s how you get to Paris. Waterloo and Victoria work because they’re the gateway to the prosperous deep south.
Whereas Euston is a piece of infrastructure designed specifically to convey the basic futility of hope. It says, welcome to your joyless post-industrial future ant-beings. Welcome to four hundred panic-stricken people stampeding past the Upper Crust for the right to be compressed into a leaking metal tube and despatched from the capital in the manner of a landlord gleefully hurling your suitcases out on to the gravel. It speaks to the ongoing scandal of the north-south divide, a state of neglect that hurts the whole country, but for which no one ever has any kind of plan besides leveraging discontent, votes for bullshit.
But again it is also a sport thing, if only because sport remains one of the key reasons many people try to travel around the country at all. Football people have always been treated terribly on trains. The piss-soaked football specials remain a legend to scare the children with, just another part of the rusted and crumbling football architecture of the late 20th century.
There is a circularity to this. In the current age of outsourced neglect we are now at a point where the nation’s infrastructure is barely fit to serve the gleaming projections of its football product. It is genuinely embarrassing to see Premier League tourists travelling on these trains, baffled by the contrast between the two experiences.
And yes, because we have sold our assets off to a bunch of investment funds staffed by chatbots, Avanti West Coast will be disgorging you on to the Euston Road 10 minutes after the last tube has gone. This is just what we do in post-giving-a-shit Britain. Welcome to the (very expensive) cheap seats. Is the country really in a fit state to stage a 24-team Euro 2028, with five of its venues on the Euston line? Meanwhile people keep talking about building the Wembley of the north, which is fine, but how will people get there, even from other bits of the north?
The wretchedness of the physical space speaks to something else too, a general disintegration of the real-life experience. Attending Uefa events is demonstrably traumatic. Ludicrously late kick off times and a lack of thought on distances and scheduling are all standard. A Saudi World Cup that plans to market itself as an everyone’s-welcome fan fest: this is presumably what people mean by gaslighting. Sport gives you front row seats for all this, the feeling that you are an inconvenience to be managed for profit, that turning up in the physical space rather than passively consuming will be treated as a niche encumbrance.
There was at least some comfort to be had in the fact the City-Arsenal chaos was made worse by the Labour conference happening in Liverpool, that those with some power over this were forced to enter the Avanti-scape. I hope they got declassified. I hope Wes Streeting was ankle-crunched by a bald bloke sweatily skirting a pillar. I hope they stopped outside Rugby for three hours while Dave from Egham had a coke-bump aggro incident and some unimpressive police officers arrived to offer interminable solutions.
Perhaps things will begin to change now. But we must keep going all the same. Attendance through the pain, insisting on being physically present, is by now an act of resistance. One day the people will rise up against corporate greed and disdain for the masses, and there’s a fair chance they’ll do so on the Euston concourse waiting for the delayed 12.53 to Manchester Piccadilly.
